“I start to ask myself how many people do I sit near at work that have a ticker attached to a stick of dynamite somewhere inside their wretched, tortured soul. One guy I know has a combative ex-wife and a messed up kid who hit puberty and has seemingly taken to questioning why he should bother. Another has a similarly combative ex-wife and a daughter who gets used as a proxy-war battlefield in the aftermath of a failed marriage. They seem like level-headed guys who handle their personnal demons — for now.
“The economy stays bad, America seems to decline and the culture gets more corsened and raw with each passing year of movies and musical acts. . . . The Bell Curve has seemingly been dragged in the wrong direction. What’s average now would have rated disgusting in a better age passed.”
— from “The Poisoning Of The Trees –- An Idiot Creates A Metaphor,” at RedState.com
The Blog Genie Is Out of the Bottle
The guys who run the Memeorandum political news blog aggregator have another aggregator called Mediagazer, which is the source for this comment by Matt Schuler:
At the heart of the New York Times article is the suggestion that Facebook and Twitter are monopolizing the time that used to be dedicated to writing.
When I wrote about the New York Times “Death of Blogging” article yesterday, some of the commenters took an either/or view:
Blogging takes an ability to write and something to write about. Most people who text and pay attention to their Facebook pages have neither.
A blog dies because the blogger has no ability or reason to write. Texting and following a Facebook page is a waste of time. But to those who waste their time texting and visiting Facebook, their time isn’t worth much.
So you see here the idea that people “waste their time texting and visiting Facebook,” an idea I don’t share: What you do on Facebook or any other medium may be important or trivial. The medium does not determine the value or content of the message, but there are certain types of messages best suited to different media.
Many people have argued that blogs are best suited to short-form writing, although I’ve used this site from time to time to write articles of 2,000 or more words. The form and the content are independent of the medium, but if you want to write something longer than 140 characters, Twitter obviously won’t do. However, as I said yesterday, the argument whether Facebook or Twitter or any other medium can somehow “replace” blogs requires us to ask, “What do you mean by ‘blog’?” WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg writes:
Blogging has legs — it’s been growing now for more than a decade, but it’s not a “new thing” anymore. Underneath the data in the article there’s an interesting super-trend that the Times misses: people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online. If you’re reading this blog you probably know the thrill of posting and getting feedback is addictive, and once you have a taste of that it’s hard to go back.
That’s just it: The phrase “blog” can mean many things, but at rock bottom it means “instantaneous self-publishing” — without any institutional barriers to publication. In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using blog software or Facebook or Twitter (I use all three). You can leave a comment here and instantly see it online (unless it gets caught in the moderation queue) and someone can respond to your comment in the same instantaneous way, so that you are having a real-time written dialogue to which anyone can contribute.
Participating in this conversation, however, requires a certain level of skill in reading, writing and thinking. There is no point writing a blog for the semi-literate, but there are lots of semi-literate people on Facebook.
Dan Riehl’s observation that the New York Times was engaged in wishful thinking — they want “blogs to go away so badly, they consistently look for ways to suggest that’s the case” — points toward the self-serving narrative of the traditional media, who wish to regain their lost monopoly on publishing. They are the middlemen who are eliminated by self-publishing technology.
Some of my Catholic friends deride my Protestant faith with the phrase, “Every man his own Pope,” and in the unfettered environment of online communication, every man is his own Pinch Sulzberger. That is to say the reader becomes his own editor, and can choose his own filter for information. You can subscribe to Alyssa Milano’s Twitter feed and get updates like this:
LIBYA: Protesters post videos to substantiate claims http://lat.ms/fX6dvx
Or you can bookmark Bob Belvedere’s The Camp of the Saints and get headlines like this:
And you can read this blog as a route to finding all that and more. The idea that people are using Tweets from an actress to stay updated on the latest news is perhaps no stranger than the idea that I, sitting here in my pajamas, can treat Alyssa Milano and Bob Belvedere as equals. Regular blog consumers probably wouldn’t even notice that contrast if I didn’t call it to their attention, because you have become accustomed to reading Charles G. Hill or Dan Collins cited as authorities equal (or superior) to bigtime pundits like Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post.
The Decides have lost their authority to decide.
Bloggers undermine the media establishment’s authority, as do all readers who seek out alternative voices online. Not everything about this democratizing influence of New Media technology is good, of course. The same technology that enables Ann Althouse to be a widely-read commentator also enables idiots to make death threats against her.
For good or ill, however, the genie of instantaneous self-publishing is out of the bottle, and nothing the New York Times writes about this phenomenon can put the blog genie back into the bottle.
Mitch Daniels Boomlet Ends
He just threw Scott Walker under the bus:
Democrats went into a behind-closed-doors meeting Monday, refusing to return to the floor. Today, sources told The Indianapolis Star that Democrat lawmakers have left the state.
Daniels, a Republican, supported their right to deny Republicans a quorum to do business and the rights of labor unions to protest at the Statehouse.
“The activities of today are perfectly legitimate part of the process,” he said. “Even the smallest minority, and that’s what we’ve heard from in the last couple days, has every right to express the strength of its views and I salute those who did.”
The Underground Conservative was never on the Daniels 2012 bandwagon, but he’s sure as hell off it now:
Daniels took another step toward revealing himself as a Not Ready For Prime Time Player today when he told Indiana House Republicans to drop the Right-to-Work bill . . .
If you don’t support the right to work without interference from union goons, you’re not conservative:
Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that Republicans should drop the right-to-work bill that has brought the Indiana House to a standstill for two days and imperiled other measures.
Daniels told reporters this afternoon that he expects House Democrats will return to work if the bill dies. It would be unfortunate if other bills are caught up in the turmoil, he said.
One of Daniels’ pundit fans, Jim Geraghty now says he’s “extremely disappointed.”
UPDATE: “Alternate headline: ‘Apparently, Mitch Daniels not running for president.’”
Philip Klein bids for the Understatement of the Year Award: “In another move unlikely to endear him to conservative primary voters should he decide to seek the presidency . . .”
UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin: “Unfortunately, GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels has gone and made himself an honorary fleebagger.”
Hey, you know who benefits from this?
Cashing In
OK, so you get hired to do a job and, when the job’s over, you try to hustle a buck by stabbing your former employer in the back.
Explain to me why anyone should ever trust you. Or better yet, explain to me why anyone should ever do anything except spit on the ground when your name is mentioned.
Must be nice to get your book proposal promoted by Politico, you worthless two-faced backstabbing crapweasel.
URGENT BREAKING NEWS!
Alyssa Milano is going to be a mom!
The actress, 38, and her husband Dave Bugliari, 32, are expecting their first child, Milano’s rep confirms to PEOPLE exclusively.
“They’re just over the moon,” says a friend of the “Who’s The Boss” and “Charmed” alum, who’s due in early fall. “They are so excited.”
She Tweeted me in late September and, five months later, announces she’s pregnant. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
UPDATE: The official confirmation Tweet:
UPDATE II: Trust me, this is way more important than Moammar Qaddafi. Washington Post, CBS News, New York Daily News, New York Post, ABC News — all the really important news outlets are covering this story.
Michael Moore: Own a Gun? Racist!
“There’s a reason why we want to own these guns. . . . The vast majority of these guns are owned by people who live in safe parts of town, or mostly in suburbs and rural areas, places where there are very few murders. . . . Why do you have a gun? What are you afraid of? . . . That imaginary person who’s going to break into your home and kill you — who’s that person going to look like? It’s not freckle-faced Jimmy down the street, is it, really? . . . We never really want to talk about the racial or class part of this, in terms of how it’s the poor or people of color that we imagine, we’re afraid of. . . . We also need to address the larger issue of, why are we such a violent people? And not just personal, domestic violence, but a nation that invades other countries, that has such a huge weapons budget, that just seems so intent on violence being the answer.”
— Michael Moore on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” MSNBC
‘Gutfeld Claims He Was Offered His Fox Show Because of His Writing on HuffPost’
Jehuda the Rhetorican called my attention to that claim made, in a letter to the president of the Newspaper Guild, by the senior vice president of public relations for Huffington Post, Mario Ruiz:
We couldn’t agree more with your goal of ensuring journalists are paid for their work. It’s why HuffPost has 143 editors, writers, and reporters on our edit team. But we feel there’s a critical distinction between our editors and reporters and the people who contribute to our group blog. While we pay our editors and reporters, we don’t pay for the opinion pieces submitted by our thousands of bloggers. The vast majority of our bloggers understand the value of having a platform that reaches a very large audience. People blog on HuffPost for free for the same reason they go on cable TV shows every night for free — because they are passionate about their ideas, want them to be heard by the largest possible audience, and understand the value that that kind of visibility can bring (the visibility of being on HuffPost has led to our bloggers being invited on TV to discuss their posts, to paid speeches, to book deals, to a TV show — Greg Gutfeld claims he was offered his Fox show because of his writing on HuffPost). Our bloggers can choose to write for HuffPost — or not write for HuffPost.
They can write as often as like they like or as little as they like. It’s both wrong and offensive to insist that HuffPost is exploiting journalists.
I suppose we’ll hear more about this from Greg “I Would Be Nobody Without HuffPo” Gutfeld. But I ask you to pay attention to how HuffPo itself distinguishes among its contributors: If you write a free blog for them, you are by definition not a journalist.
Because if you were a journalist, they’d have to pay you. As it is, you’re writing for free because you’re “passionate about [your] ideas,” as opposed to Arianna Huffington, who’s passionate about her $18 million lump-sum payment and her $4 million annual salary.
Also, if you blog for HuffPo and don’t have your own cable-TV show yet, it’s because you suck.
‘Wrist Slaps for Everyone’
That’s Allahpundit’s prognosis for the outcome of the “investigation” of University of Wisconsin doctors writing bogus excuses for protesters in Madison:
This involves a few individuals out of the nearly 1,300 physicians at UW Health.
These UW Health physicians were acting on their own and without the knowledge or approval of UW Health. These charges are very serious and in response, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and University of Wisconsin Medical Foundation, the UW Health entities that employ the physicians, have immediately launched an investigation of the reported behavior.
The investigation will identify which UW Health physicians were involved and whether their behavior constituted violations of medical ethics or University of Wisconsin and UW Health policies and work rules.
The situation in Madison illustrates what happens when “medical ethics” meets “social justice”:
Although this might seem an outrageous breach of professional ethics, it is actually entirely consistent with the new brand of “progressive” medical ethics currently taught to medical students. . . .
In 2002, the American College of Physicians proposed a charter in which the three guiding ethical principles for physicians would be: patient welfare, patient autonomy, and “social justice.” In 2007, the AMA ITME (American Medical Association Initiative to Transform Medical Education) reported on the importance of training medical students to be better advocates for “social justice,” and proposed changes in the medical school admissions criteria and curriculum to address this perceived inadequacy.
And let’s face it: Once doctors are taught that abortion is a “right,” any traditional concept of “medical ethics” becomes invalid. Whence did such value-judgments (e.g., that the “right” to abortion trumps the physician’s interest in preserving life, or that the “right” of protesting budget cuts justifies a bogus medical excuse) arrive in our institutions of higher learning? How did these ideas entrench themselves so deeply in academia? Continue reading ‘Wrist Slaps for Everyone’ →